India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

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India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy Page 114

by Ramachandra Guha

5

  Garga, So Many Cinemas, p. 151.

  6

  Rajya Sabha Debates, 26 November and 10 December 1954: the Current, 22 December 1954.

  7

  Amrit Gangar, ‘Films from the City of Dreams’, in Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, eds, Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  8

  Cf. Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘The Bombay Film Poster’, Seminar, May 2003.

  9

  Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1976), pp. 90–1.

  10

  Manmohan Desai quoted in Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 45.

  11

  George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891; reprint London: J. M. Dent, 1997), p. 354.

  12

  The best introduction to the narrative structure of the Indian film is Nasreen Munni Kabir’s Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story (London: Channel 4 Books, 2001). But see also Panna Shah, The Indian Film (Bombay: The Motion Picture Society of India, 1950); Agehananda Bharati, ‘Anthropology of Hindi Films’ (in two parts) Illustrated Weekly of India, 30 January and 6 February 1977.

  13

  S. S. Vasan, quoted in Robert L. Hardgrave and Anthony C. Neidhart, ‘Films and Political Consciousness’ in Tamil Nadu,’ Economic and Political Weekly 11 January 1975.

  14

  Mukul Kesavan, ‘An Undergraduate History of Hindi Cinema’, in B. G. Verghese, Tomorrow’s India: Another Tryst with Destiny (New Delhi: Viking, 2006), p. 323.

  15

  Naresh Fernandes, ‘Remembering Anthony Gonsalves’, Seminar, November 2004. See also Vanraj Bhatia, ‘Film Music’, Seminar, December 1961; Manuel, Cassette Culture, chapter 3.

  16

  Ashraf Aziz, Light of the Universe: Essays on Hindustani Film Music (New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2003), pp. xvii–xviii.

  17

  Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, quoted in H. Y. Sharada Prasad, ‘Ye kaun aaj aaya savere savere’, The Asian Age, 18 May 2005.

  18

  Nasreen Munni Kabir, ‘Playback Time: A Brief History of Bollywood Film Songs’, Film Comment, May–June 2002, p. 41. For loving and informative sketches of the lyricists, composers and singers in Hindi film music, see Manek Premchand, Yesterday’s Melodies, Today’s Memories (Mumbai: Jharna Books, 2003).

  19

  Steve Derné, Movies, Masculinity and Modernity: An Ethnography of Men’s Filmgoing in India (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), chapter 2. Cf. also Narendra Panjwani, ‘A Small Town Goes to the Movies’, Hindi, vol. 2, no. 2, 2001.

  20

  Sara Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and ‘Opposing Faces: Film Star Fan Clubs and the Construction of Class Identities in South India’, in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, eds, Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  21

  On Bachchan’s career see, inter alia, Chidananda Das Gupta, The Painted Face: Studies in India’s Popular Cinema (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1991), pp. 239ff.; Ashok Banker, Bollywood (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 67–77.

  22

  E.g. Sunday, issue of 24 February–2 March 1985.

  23

  Kaveree Bamzai, ‘A Legend turns 60’, India Today, 21 October 2002.

  24

  These biographical details have been gleaned from Harish Bhimani, In Search of Lata Mangeshkar (New Delhi: Indus, 1995); Punita Bhatt, ‘The Lata Legend’, Filmfare, 1–15 June 1987.

  25

  Sunil Sethi, quoted in Garga, So Many Cinemas, p. 192.

  26

  Cf. Anupama Chopra, Sholay: The Making of a Classic (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 29 and passim.

  27

  Ashokamitran, My Years with Boss: At Gemini Studios (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002), pp. 16–17.

  28

  The Current, 3 September 1952.

  29

  Mukul Kesavan, ‘Cine Qua Non!’, Outlook, 18 August 1997.

  30

  See Mukul Kesavan, ‘Urdu, Awadh and the Tawaif: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema’, in Zoya Hasan, ed., Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and theState (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994).

  31

  Jerry Pinto, ‘The Woman who Could not Care’, in First Proof: The Penguin Book of New Writing from India, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 49–50.

  32

  Mamooty quoted in Shajahan Madampat, ‘Portrait of a Religious Muslim as a Secular Icon’, unpublished paper kindly shown to me by its author.

  33

  Bunny Reuben, Follywood Flashback: A Collection of Movie Memories (New Delhi: Indus, 1993), p. 267.

  34

  Among the many studies of Ray the best are probably Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (London: André Deutsch, 1989); and Chidananda Dasgupta, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, 2nd edn (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2001).

  35

  The work of these and other directors is discussed in Yves Thorat, The Cinemas of India (1896–2000) (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2000).

  36

  This account draws on Rustom Bharucha, ‘Ninasam: A Cultural Alternative’, chapter 14 of his Theatre and the World (New Delhi: Manohar, 1990); various reports publishedby Ninasam and my own visits to Heggodu.

  37

  H. Y. Sharada Prasad, ‘Subanna’, The Asian Age, 19 October 2005.

  38

  Sudhanva Deshpande, ‘Habib Tanvir: Upside-Down Midas’, Economic and Political Weekly, 13 September 2003.

  39

  Gaddar’s life and work is the subject of a forthcoming book by Venkat Rao. Among many articles by Rao, see especially his ‘Writing Orally: Decolonization from Below’, Positions, vol. 7, no. 1, 1999.

  40

  See, among other works, Bonnie C. Wade, Music in India: The Classical Traditions (1979; revised edn Delhi: Manohar, 2001); Mohan Nadkarni, The Great Masters: Profiles in Hindustani Classical Music (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 1999); Ludwig Pesch, The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  41

  See Indira Menon, The Madras Quartet: Women in Karnatak Music (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1999), pp. 173–8. The most recent biography of Subbulakshmi is T. J. George’’s MS: A Life in Music (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2004). I have also drawn here on an unpublished essay on MS by the music scholar Keshav Desiraju.

  42

  There is, as yet, no biography of Ravi Shankar. I have drawn here on his own autobiography, Raga Mala (Guildford: Genesis Publications, 1997), on conversations with music lovers and on my own thirty-year experience of listening to Ravi Shankar.

  43

  For more on these and other artists, the interested reader is referred to Kumar Mukherji’s The Lost World of Hindustani Music (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006), a quite wonderful and richly anecdotal history by a scholar-performer.

  44

  Times of India (Bangalore), 3 March 2003; The Asian Age, 3 March 2003.

  45

  The arguments in these paragraphs have been elaborated at greater length in Ramachandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport (London: Picador, 2002). Cf. also Richard Cashman, Patrons, Players, and the Crowd: The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1980).

  46

  C. Rajagopalachari, quoted in Pon. Thangamani, History of Broadcasting in India: With Special Reference to Tamil Nadu, 1924–1954 (Chennai: Ponnaiah Pathipagam, 2000), pp. 104–5.

  47

  See Mehra Masani, Broadcasting and the People (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1976). Cf. also David Lelyveld, ‘Transmitters and Culture: The Colonial Roots of Indian Broadcasting’, South Asia Research, vol. 10, no. 1, 1990.

  48

  The Hindu, 19 July 1953.

  49
<
br />   David Lelyveld, ‘Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All-India Radio’, in Carol A. Breckenridge, ed., Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

  50

  Ritu Sarin, ‘Doordarshan: The Money Machine’, Sunday, 18–24 August 1985.

  51

  Chidananda Dasgupta, ‘Cinema: The Unstoppable Chariot’, in Hiranmay Karlekar, ed., Independent India: The First Fifty Years (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 442.

  52

  See Wimal Dissanayake and Malti Sahai, ‘Raj Kapoor and the Indianization of Chaplin’, paper presented at a symposium on ‘Humour in Cinema: East and West’, Waikiki, Hawaii, 29 November–3 December, 1986.

  53

  The Current, 28 September 1955.

  54

  Bunny Reuben, Raj Kapoor: The Fabulous Showman (New Delhi: Indus, 1995), pp. 88f.

  55

  Times of India, 5 January 1952.

  56

  K. A. Abbas, I Am not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), p. 372.

  57

  Personal communication from Professor James C. Scott of Yale University.

  58

  Stephen Alter, Amritsar to Lahore: Crossing the Border between India and Pakistan (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 132–3, 136, 172–3, 178.

  59

  ‘Bowled Over by Bollywood’, Guardian Weekly, 27 May–5 June 2005.

  60

  ‘Move over LA, Here Comes Bombay’, The Times, 22 June 2000.

  61

  Time, 27 October 2003. See also the essays in Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, Bollywood: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005).

  62

  Sudhanva Deshpande, ‘Hindi Films: The Rise of the Consumable Hero’, Himal South Asian, August 2001.

  63

  Times of India, 25 February 2004.

  64

  S. S. Vasan, ‘Film Production in India Today’, in R. M. Ray, ed., Film Seminar Report 1955 (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1955), pp. 33–5.

  Epilogue: Why India Survives

  1

  Robert D. Kaplan, ‘The Lawless Frontier’, Atlantic Monthly, September 1999.

  2

  Ayaz Amir, ‘The Beauty of Democracy’, first published in Dawn, reprinted in The Asian Age, 17 May 2004.

  3

  Yogendra Yadav, ‘Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in Electoral Politics in the 1990s’, in Francine R. Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava and Balveer Arora, eds, Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 133.

  4

  Report in the Deccan Herald, 10 October 2004.

  5

  Bela Bhatia, ‘The Naxalite Movement’ in Central Bihar’, unpublished PhD thesis, Faculty of Social and Political Studies, Cambridge University, 2000, pp. 11–20.

  6

  J. M. Lyngdoh, quoted in Times of India, 3 December 2003.

  7

  See, for instance, the collected works of R. K. Laxman, published by Penguin India. Laxman is the most prolific and (by common consent) the most original of Indian cartoonists, but there have been many other gifted practitioners, who, like him, specialize in political satire.

  8

  Obituary in The Telegraph (Kolkata), 2 January 2003.

  9

  Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons (London: Verso, 1998), p. 132.

  10

  Sunil Khilnani, ‘Democracy and Nationalism in India’, lecture delivered at the Collège de France, 30 May 2005, p. 2.

  11

  Isaiah Berlin, ‘Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power’ (1979), in his Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1997), pp. 346–7, 353–4.

  12

  The modern literature on nationalism would fill a decent-sized library. For a sampling of relevant works see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997). Cf. also the classic early work of Hans Kohn: Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1955).

  13

  See Mukul Kesavan, Secular Common Sense (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2001).

  14

  See Javeed Alam, Who Wants Democracy? (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004).

  15

  Bernard D. Nossiter, Soft State: A Newspaperman’s Chronicle of India (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 119–23.

  16

  Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question (London: Martin Lawrence, 1936), pp. 5–6.

  17

  Quoted in Peter A. Blitstein, ‘Nation-Building or Russification? Obligatory Russian Instruction in the Soviet Non-Russian School’, in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds, A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Building in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 255.

  18

  See Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 89–91.

  19

  See S. M. Burke, ed., Jinnah: Speeches and Statements 1947–1948 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 150 (emphasis added).

  20

  Arundhati Roy, ‘How Deep Shall We Dig’, The Hindu, 25 April 2004.

  21

  Cf. Hugh Tinker, Reorientations: Studies on Asia in Transition (Bombay: Oxford University Press), pp. 71f.

  22

  Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Burden of Democracy (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003), pp. 28, 114–15.

  23

  Michael Howard, quoted in Samuel Huntingdon, Who Are We? America’s Great Debate, Indian edn (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2004), pp. 28–9.

  24

  Cf. David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London: John Murray, 2005).

  25

  CAD, vol. 10, pp. 43–51.

  26

  On the history and functioning of the IAS see David C. Potter, India’s Political Administrators: From ICS to IAS (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); K. P. Krishnan and T. V. Somanathan, ‘Civil Service: An Institutional Perspective’, in Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds, Public Institutions in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  27

  Nehru to General Lockhart, 13 August 1947, in Group 49, Part I, Cariappa Papers, National Archives of India, New Delhi.

  28

  See papers in Group21, Part II, ibid.

  29

  Nehru to Cariappa, 13 October 1952, in Group XLIX, Part I, Cariappa Papers.

  30

  Report in The Hindu, 14 January 1953, reproduced in the same newspaper on 14 January 2003.

  31

  See correspondence in Group 49, Part I, Cariappa Papers, National Archivesof India, New Delhi.

  32

  Note of 12 December 1958, Group 33, Part I, ibid. Cariappa went on to claim that for these Pakistani generals ‘war between India and Pakistan was simply unthinkable’.

  33

  Frank Moraes to General Cariappa, 19 December 1968, Group 49, Part I, ibid.

  34

  J. S. Aurora, ‘If Khalistan Comes, the Sikhs will be the Losers’, in Patwant Singh and Harji Malik, eds, Punjab: The Fatal Miscalculation (New Delhi: Patwant Singh, 1985), pp. 137–8.

  35

  C. Rajagopalachari quoted in Guy Wint, Spotlight on Asia (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 130.
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  36

  George Woodcock, Beyond the Blue Mountains: An Autobiography (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1987), p. 105.

  37

  S. Gopal, ‘The English Language in India Since Independence’, in John Grigg, ed., Nehru Memorial Lectures, 1966–1991 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 202–3.

  38

  Jonathan Parry, ‘Nehru’s Dream and the Village “Waiting Room”: Long-Distance Labour Migrants to a Central Indian Steel Town’, paper to be published in Contributions to Indian Sociology.

  39

  See Nasreen Munni Kabir, Talking Films: Conversations on Hindi Cinema with Javed Akhtar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 35.

  40

  Martin Walker, Makers of the American Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), Preface.

  41

  Samuel Huntingdon, Who Are We? (reprint: New Delhi. Penguin India, 2004), pp. xv–xvi, 12, 40, 61, 63, 171, 232, 316 etc.

  42

  John Howard interviewed in Time, 6 March 2006.

  43

  Ronald W. Clark, JBS: The Life and Work of JBS Haldane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).

  44

  J. B. S. Haldane to Geoff Conklin, 25 July 1962, J. B. S. Haldane Papers, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

  45

  J. Neyman(Professor of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley) to Haldane, 18 September 1961, ibid.

  46

  Haldane to Neyman, 26 September 1961, ibid.

  47

  D. N. Chatterjee to P. N. Haksar, 6 July 1971, Subject File 171, Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.

  Index

  Note – page numbers in bold refer to maps, page numbers in italics refer to information contained in tables.

  Abbas, Ghulam ref 1

  Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

  Abdullah, Farooq ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

  Abdullah, Sheikh Muhammad ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27

  Abyssinia ref 1

  Academy of Tamil Culture ref 1

  Acheson, Dean ref 1

  Achhut Kanya (film) ref 1

  Adams, John ref 1

 

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